Reading + Reflections on the iPod introduction video from 2001

Entrepreneurial Design, or Philosophy?

I never signed up for Philosophy, yet here I am doing somewhat philosophical stuff. I guess I don't have much of a choice.

The Nature of the Beast:

It's important to keep in mind the truth about the field of innovation and entrepreneurial design. For every success story, there are hundreds, or even thousands of failures. History only remembers the successful ones. For those who can't quite make it, it's quite the opposite. No matter how many articles are written and press releases held for them, they are destined to fail. Perhaps due to mismanagement of the project; perhaps due to - no fault of their own - being simply glossed over and forgotten. In a few decades, we might see a few of these still surviving and thriving. But the final destination for the vast majority of these is far from million or billion dollar valuations.

Playing the Cards:

Ideas are a Dime a Dozen; Execution is Key:

In this startup world of ours where anyone can get funding (beit from Kickstarter, its shady counterpart Indiegogo, or the plethora of sites that somehow manage to be even shadier), ideas are worth quite little. There is no such thing as the million-dollar idea anymore. In a world with over 7 billion people, chances are there's someone else who's got the same idea you do. The trick, then, lies in how you see that idea through. It doesn't matter if you've got the idea for solving world hunger, global warming, and P=NP all at once if you can't execute it. Need any evidence? Basically any episode of Shark Tank will do just fine. There's almost always someone who has mismanaged an idea badly enough that Kevin O'Leary tears them apart for it, and rightfully so. Completely viable and marketable ideas have been flushed down the drain due to poor execution. Shame.

Competition, Competition, Competition:

Making execution all the more important is the fact that competition exists. With ideas out in the open thanks to the internet, there's little chance that someone else isn't doing what you are already. The free market, then, is what decides which products float, and which ones sink. Take package delivery via drone, for example. Amazon has promised its new "Prime Air" service as "a future delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less," a lofty premise that nonetheless seems to be getting more real every day thanks to advances in technology. But of course, they're not the only ones exploring that market. Mercedes-Benz and Matternet are now also in the mix, working together to achieve something quite similar, and there are bound to be countless other companies scattered throughout. The competition is intense, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Who eventually gets that comes down to consumer preference, of course, but there are several factors that directly correlate to that:

• Marketing
• Form
• Function
• Release Date

These factors all play quite an important role in products and the market. It does not matter how good you product looks and acts if nobody knows what it is, or there are already plenty of similar products on the market. At the same time, releasing an incomplete product early while spending important R&D dollars on marketing instead leads to an underwhelming product, disappointed customers, and a tarnished reputation (*ahem* No Man's Sky, though there are plenty more examples out there). It becomes a delicate balancing act, one which startups may not be able to sustain on their own. But with startups at the heart of innovation due to their "nothing to lose; everything to gain" mentality, it may well be worth the risk. For those that don't quite make it, well, in a few decades, the world will have forgotten entirely of their existence.

The Steve Jobs Way:

Few can deny that Steve Jobs was a legendary innovator and businessman. Even being kicked out of his own company didn't phase him, and he made his eventual triumphant return. Just what made Jobs such a brilliant orator, though? What did he do right?

Let's examine his introduction of the first generation iPod. Such a product was completely new, and was given a target market of everybody, because it's "A part of everyone's life." And Jobs does this quite well. He introduces the market, and the fact that there is no market leader. He mentions the digital music revolution, and how he believes that Apple will lead it.

He gives several alternatives to the iPod, and dissects exactly why each alternative cannot stand up to the iPod in terms of price/song, essentially telling the consumer in the most objective way possible that the iPod is the best way to get portable music.

As if that wasn't enough, he seems to never run out of ways in which the iPod and all the other products of the Apple ecosystem it's built around are better than anything else. Automatic integration with iTunes. Comparability with iMac. Long battery life. Fast file transfers. And all that in the contained in a device the size of a deck of cards.

For the time, this device truly was revolutionary. And Steve Jobs did quite a good job telling the world exactly why it was.

Sorry I had to.